Shameless advertising - please click and sign up!

Thursday, 20 November 2008

As a programmer/scripter I'm very interested in the possibilities of scripting and automating for multiplayer online games. I spent a lot of time the in 90's (gosh that makes me feel old) writing scripts for playing telnet text-based MUDs (Multi User Dungeons). Different MUDs had different rules regarding this. The one I played most allowed scripting but only on the premise that you were atk at the time and the scripts were just aids to help you deal with repetitive tasks. The advent of unmetered internet access also had a big effect and truly allowed 24/7 botting. It became a form of competition in itself to write a better, faster, more intelligent bot that could cater for many scenarios. As time has moved on and the player base has drifted off into playing CStrike, WoW, poker and the next generation of online gaming the rules have slackened to allow full botting when afk although restrictions do still apply. My MUD bot still runs although I haven't been atk there in months and I'm sad to admit it (along with those that are left) after all the hours put into characters and scripts the game is dying. My online time there puts the game hours of the current generation to shame. In the 16 years since I joined this MUD in 1992 I probably have an online time of around 8-10 years.

The illegality of all poker botting activities has kept me away from attempting anything with online poker, but I was interested to read this article on poker bots.

I wonder if the future of poker will see our bots playing each other as we all move our concious selves to the next big thing? If poker botting advances beyond the capabilities of detection with neural nets on quantum PCs then any poker other than live play could become futile.